A coalition including Harvard and George Mason is developing MUVEES, Multi-User Virtual Environment Experiential Simulators, which uses museum multimedia to create a virtual world where students can learn cooperatively online.

Gravel (more info) is another college-educational video-game research and development group, part of the New Media Institute at the University of Minnesota. Their proposal gives some estimates of how much it costs to produce a video game, even with deep educational discounts.

Some of the biggest challenges in designing a video game involve the graphical environment, but tools for this part of a game are already partly developed in the form of virtual field trips and visualization software (Drummond, 2003 ).

Challenges for Educators Creating Video Games

Video-game designers and academic geologists are the products of intensive but very different training.

Academics are used to lecturing and writing, presenting material in words, and taking things step by step.

But video games are about pictures, especially animated ones, and letting the player decide in what order to perform tasks (Prensky, 2001a ).

Additionally, good graphic artists, animators, and programmers will be essential for producing good video games. This is not a task for academics to handle alone.

The expenses are mostly for software and the time of professionals, not really for hardware.

Animation software is available to educators at a deep discount, but a commercial-grade video game will still cost university consortia millions to make.

Do educational video games need to be as visually spectacular as commercial ones? Probably not, but an "engine", the part of the software that makes a game interactive, flexible, and easy to use, is still quite expensive to design.